'La La Land' gives us another way to look at our incredible bond with songs

By Vicky Hallett | Washington Post,By Vicky Hallett

February 7, 2017

Photo: Dale Robinette, HO

Ryan Gosling as Sebastian and Emma Stone as Mia in a scene from the movie "La La Land" directed by Damien Chazelle. (Dale Robinette/Lionsgate/TNS)

Ryan Gosling as Sebastian and Emma Stone as Mia in a scene from the...

Daniel Glaser has not seen "La La Land." But he knows that the Oscar-nominated film has singing in it. That's interesting to him - from a neuroscience point of view.

He promises to share that perspective each week in his new podcast, "A Neuroscientist Explains," which is based on Glaser's regular column of the same name in the Guardian's Observer magazine. His 200-word space is too tight to explain much of anything, so on the podcast Glaser delves deeper into topics he can only flick at in print. And he does it in a particularly British way - for example, by invoking imagery of pub bathrooms and words such as "knackered."

In the debut episode, Glaser turns his attention to the popularity of the Emma Stone-Ryan Gosling musical. (He's pretty sure those are the two stars, anyway.) His theory? The tunes provide audiences with a way to escape in these "troubled times."

Music as therapy is a growing area of research, and what particularly fascinates Glaser is that "the biology of words that are sung seems to be different from the biology of words that are spoken."

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Specific "bits" of the brain are in charge of certain tasks, explains Glaser, who suggests that if you want to know more, just run an internet search on "speech area brain." Anyway, that's why someone who has sustained damage to the brain and lost the ability to speak might nonetheless be able to burst into song.

To learn more about the topic, Glaser calls on his pal Lauren Stewart, a psychologist from Goldsmiths, University of London, and the co-director of the Center for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University in Denmark.

The relationships we form with songs are incredible, she says, citing her own recent experience rocking out to a Madonna album. It was the first tape she acquired for her Walkman, and although she hadn't heard most of it in 30 years, she remembered every tune and lyric. For Alzheimer's patients, there's a lot of potential in that kind of recall.

There's also promising work being done with "melodic intonation therapy," which can help patients with aphasia learn to say specific phrases, Stewart explains. And linking movement to music can lead to remarkable rehabilitation results.

But Stewart isn't onboard with Glaser's notion that "La La Land" is popular because music offers a way to disengage from the world. It's the opposite, she says: Music brings people together, and it gives them another way to protest. Also, she's actually seen the movie.